Rice University

The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King

Author(s): Anne Elizabeth Carson
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 45, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth
Century (Summer, 2005), pp. 537-556
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844601 .
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SEL45, 3 (Summer 2005): 537-556 537
ISSN 0039-3657

The Hunted Stag and the

Beheaded King

ANNE ELIZABETH CARSON

Pardon me, Julius! Here wast thou bay'd, brave hart,

Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand,
Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy lethe.
O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,
And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee.
How like a deer, strooken by many princes,
Dost thou here lie!1

Confronting the conspirators, Antony invokes a powerfully

poignant image: he paints the fallen Caesar as a noble yet helpless
stag. Bayed, the Roman emperor finds he cannot claw his way
out, but must submit to the fatal violence of the treasonous mob.
Once the proverbial king of the "forest," as Antony mourns, the
heart/hart of the world, Caesar, now lies inert upon the ground;
the lifeblood of the butchered animal adorns the hands and faces
of merciless hunters. Such is the juxtaposition that resonates
throughout literary history: man with animal, the hunted beast
with the sacrificed hero. The unfairly slain Caesars of the world
spur aesthetic comparisons with wounded deer and slaugh-
tered sheep. No longer a fierce combatant engaged in a battle
to preserve his own notions of pride and righteousness, Caesar
suddenly metamorphoses into a vulnerable martyr, an innocent
creature whose blood, in this particular dramatic moment, seems
too easily spilt.
Roughly half a century later, the figure of Charles I comes
to be regularly associated with this same type of mammalian
martyrdom. In his study of Cavalier poetry, Earl Miner starkly

Anne Elizabeth Carson is currently completing a Ph.D. at Temple Univer-

sity. She is an instructor at West Chester University.
538 Hunted Stag and Beheaded King

comments on the seventeenth-century recognition that "[w]e are

dying animals."2 Writers of the period become increasingly aware
that "between man and the other creatures [are] numerous resem-
blances and correspondences."3 Especially given the emergence
of empiricist philosophies and the Cartesian belief that the body
is a "machine," people are apt, at least in terms of a corporeal
existence, to lump the ultimate fates of man and beast together.
Thus, transforming the "martyr" king into a stalked animal seems
a natural response to the horror and chaos of wartime events and
a reliable way for writers to gain public sympathy and galvanize
waning Royalist morale, not to mention that such portrayals of
Charles I offer the reading public a fresh perspective on this fairly
inaccessible monarch. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler, for instance,
argues that the postwar period sees a "democratized image of
the king" surface. James Loxley insists that in their impassioned
endeavors, the poets offer "naked presentations of kingly power-
lessness." Quoting Joad Raymond, Robert Wilcher contends that
mid-seventeenth-century poetry and prose help alter Charles's
image from that of "a ruler deprived of his rights into a human
deprived of affection and compassion," while elsewhere Raymond
more succinctly suggests that much of the verse of the period
positions the king as a "fugitive prey."4
What these critics indirectly point to is a move away from the
historical and cliched poetry commonly associated with political
elegy and formal lament toward the sentimental style that rises
to popularity in the mid- and late eighteenth century. In linking
images of hunted and butchered prey to King Charles, the poets
of the postwar era tend to emphasize humanitarianism, empathy,
and what Northrop Frye might deem "romantic or penseroso feel-
ings," those qualities distinctive of the later poetics of sensibility.5
They interpolate images of maimed animals in order to illustrate
more clearly the sheer brutality of which men are capable and
to vivify the consequent pain and suffering experienced by the
vanquished monarch. Not only do they undertake to decon-
struct Charles's staunch kingly image, but, unable to separate
the emotion from the hunt, the pity from the prey, poets such
as Margaret Cavendish, Andrew Marvell, Henry King, and John
Denham anticipate, for example, the wistful narrator of William
Wordsworth's "Hart Leap Well" who laments:

The poor Hart toils along the mountain-side;

I will not stop to tell how far he fled,
Nor will I mention by what death he died;
Anne Elizabeth Carson 539

But now the Knight beholds him lying dead.

?. oo. o. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Upon his side the Hart was lying stretched:

His nostril touched a spring beneath a hill,
And with the last deep groan his breath had fetched
The waters of the spring were trembling still.6

The postwar lyricists presage a movement that merges private grief

with social action, that dehistoricizes history in an effort to cre-
ate a more pathetic version of the past, that regards the self and
its feelings first and strives to create an organic poetic universe
around human emotion. While we cannot completely dismiss
the political implications of post-Civil War poetry, we can situate
this particular brand of verse-that concerned with the hunted
stag-as moving away from traditional variations of historical elegy
toward a more sentimental experience of war and regicide.7
The use of pathetic animal imagery speaks to an increased
desire to motivate audiences to read with the heart rather than
with the head. In works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney,
Shakespeare, and even Virgil, we recurrently discern a call to
exercise tolerance and sensitivity toward the lesser creatures.8 A
long-running literary trend, the sympathetic portrayal of animals
bespeaks, in part, mankind's preoccupation with its own tenuous
place on earth. Just as a helpless beast inevitably succumbs to
pain and torment, so it is with a human being: a woman, a man,
even a king. In the wake of a monarch's brutal beheading-the
execution of a public figure whose name hitherto denoted invin-
cibility, a strength emanating from the very hand of God-the
mid-seventeenth century finds poets and authors grappling with
fears concerning the human condition; such fears translate into
poetry that betrays itself as vulnerable and sentient. Searching for
literary language that can effectively convey these deeply conflicted
emotions, writers of the period turn to the image of the hunted
animal. The figure of the stag or fawn becomes the metaphoric
incarnation of both the poet and the nation's despair, and such a
creature invariably comes to embody the deceased king, as a deer
is an object to which a writer can attach poignant feeling more
easily than he could to a conventional version of Charles I.
The acceptance of animals as sensitive beings becomes and
remains an important part of the culture of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. As philosophers place increasing importance
on human sensation and emotion, beliefs about the so-called
"dumb" creatures change, given that many, such as Cavendish,
540 Hunted Stag and Beheaded King

extend human attributes to animals.9 "[T]hose [animals] who

communicat[e] their sense of pain in most recognizably human
terms," argues Keith Thomas, tend to rouse man's empathetic in-
clinations. 10In the otherwise mute beasts' "howls and writhings,"
people eventually come to see reflections of their own distress.
After the war, the rise of Puritan ideas concerning mankind's
responsibilities-to include a comprehensive stewardship-af-
fects the way in which pastimes such as hunting and falconry
are received. A. Lytton Sells adduces that the mid-seventeenth
century witnesses the birth of the new, nurturing brand of land-
owner: "Every gentleman ... had a little army of animal, as well
as human, retainers, a kind of family which added immensely
to the enjoyment of life." And, obviously, as animals come to be
seen as "members of the family," people's opinions about their
expendability change. Formulating arguments to attack the long-
standing habits of hunters and those gentlemen who continue,
maintains Thomas, "putting their dogs to chase tame ducks" for
amusement's sake, the animal activists of the era engage human
sentimentality both by trying to stir sympathetic feelings for help-
less creatures and by implicitly paralleling the pain of wounded
animals with that of human beings." These lesser mammals
are everywhere, in painting, in literature, as pure emblems of
the complex emotional makeup of mankind. In verse and prose,
hunted animals come to embody torment in its most primitive
form. With the introduction of such images, poets make the por-
trait of human suffering a simple yet resonant one.
Returning to the Shakespearean passage cited above, we note
with Caroline F. E. Spurgeon that the playwright's sympathies
lie with the cornered animal. Spurgeon argues, for example, that
Shakespeare's "bird images are remarkable for the intense feeling
and sympathy they reveal for the trapped ... bird, which to him
symbolises the greatest pitch of terror and agony mortal creature
[sic] may endure."'2 In Julius Caesar it is a deer rather than a
bird that manifests the anguish of pain and suffering. And with
his brief animal-centric interludes, Shakespeare is able to pull
the spectator momentarily from a comfortable vantage point and
bring him closer to the violence, closer to the stench of blood and
death, and ultimately closer to the desperation and fear common
to all "mortal creatures." Royalist writers, much as their Renais-
sance forebears, utilize macabre images of vulnerable animals
in an attempt to draw readers closer to the realities of revolution
and provide audiences with an object to which they can attach
their grief and disillusionment over the death of Charles and the
failure of the monarchy.
AnneElizabethCarson 541

A staunch believer in the divine right of kings, John Denham

creates in his poem, Coopers Hill, a vision of Charles as "God's
vicar, as soldier-saint."'3 The composure of the king, his bright-
ness and wisdom contrast sharply with the unwieldiness of a
public that appears as a "[dark] cloud."l4 The tension between
the two, king and citizenry, stasis and chaos, informs the overall
tenor of the piece. And ultimately, the political picture that Den-
ham produces is one of controlled upheaval. In the 1642 version,
Denham paints the infamous stag-hunting scene as an allegory
of the rise and fall of behind-the-scenes power, the story of the
Earl of Strafford's collapse. Earl R. Wasserman suggests that this
early version of the poem depicts the ruin of a figure whose politi-
cal views accord almost exactly with those of the poet, both men
invested in the appreciable workings of "cosmic harmony." The
1655 version, however, Wasserman goes on to argue, undermines
the delicate balance of the poem by extending the stag scene to
eighty-eight lines; thus, "at the expense of structure" Denham
"blur[s] the political reference by greatly multiplying the purely
descriptive features."'5For Wasserman, the poignancy of the Straf-
ford downfall gets lost in the tedium of the poetic moment, as the
overall symmetry and subsequent "harmony" are threatened.
However, rather than view the later version as a flawed elabo-
ration of an already powerful political allegory, it seems important
to resituate the new scene in the context of a postwar, post-
regicidal climate. Brendan O Hehir, speaking of the 1655 poem,
finds that rather than detracting from the energy of the symbolic
creature, the additional lines transform the animal into a more
sympathetic figure, one with whom readers can readily identify:
"the additions chiefly tend to humanize the stag, attributing to
him a wide range of human emotions." Because of this anthropic
overhauling of the animal image, O Hehir submits that the new
stag, in light of the events of 1649, bespeaks a strong connection
to the deceased monarch: "Ifa case can be made for a parallel of
the earlier stag hunt to the trial and death of Strafford, a stronger
one can be made for the parallel of the revised stag hunt to the
end of King Charles I."16Rather than upsetting poetic structure
and balance, this text, because of the greater prominence of the
hunt, offers an even more intense demonstration of what Was-
serman deems the poem's "cosmic harmony." We see a powerful
example of this in the implied propinquity between Charles and
the stag. By humanizing the deer figure and elevating the animal
to a kingly status, the author is able to show the ironic oneness
of hunter and hunted.
542 Hunted Stag and Beheaded King

Examining several of the lines that Denham adds in the

emended version of the poem, we find descriptions that very much
recall the plight of the ousted king. For instance, instead of sim-
ply depicting the animal fleeing as he begins to panic, Denham
offers a glimpse of the inner struggle that unfolds in the brute
creature's mind:

He calls to mind his strength, and then his speed,

His winged heels, and then his armed head;
With these t'avoid, with that his Fate to meet:
But fear prevails, and bids him trust his feet.
(lines 259-62)

Pulled between courage and fear, the royal stag ultimately runs,
and yet readers sense that it is a hesitant flight, the result of a
tormenting decision. Later, the poet again references this inner
battle of wills: "And now too late he wishes for the fight / That
strength he wasted in Ignoble flight" (lines 293-4). The deer be-
trays a pattern of earnest introspection, one reminiscent of a king
torn between battle and escape.
The emergent humanity of the stag is especially evident in
Denham's delineation of the animal's interaction with his one-
time herd:

Like a declining States-man, left forlorn

To his friends pity, and pursuers scorn,
With shame remembers, while himself was one
Of the same herd, himself the same had done.
Thence to the coverts, & the conscious Groves,
The scenes of his past triumphs, and his loves;
Sadly surveying where he rang'd alone
Prince of the soyl, and all the herd his own;
And like a bold Knight Errant did proclaim
Combat to all, and bore away the Dame;
And taught the woods to eccho to the stream
His dreadful challenge, and his clashing beam.
Yet faintly now declines the fatal strife;
So much his love was dearer than his life.
(lines 273-86)

This involved series of reflections helps balance the stag's regality

with his vulnerability. At one time "Prince of the soyl" (a telling
phrase added in the 1655 text), the creature implicitly recasts the
Anne Elizabeth Carson 543

dethroned Charles, but it is a decidedly sentimentalized version of

the monarch. The deer suddenly reveals himself as the repentant
man of feeling. Able to brood over his prior treatment of his fellow
creatures, the stag exhibits a capacity to empathize. Seeking safety
in numbers, he is rejected by those whom he formerly spurned
and is thereafter inundated with feelings of loneliness, shame,
and remorse. The stag has a past, and more significantly, he has
a bittersweet memory of that past. Remembering in and of itself
is a highly emotional phenomenon. In his 1996 work, Searching
for Memory, Daniel Schacter submits that the way in which one
goes about remembering an episode is intimately linked with one's
immediate circumstances: "the emotions that you attribute to
the past may sometimes arise from the way in which you set out
to retrieve a memory in the present."17 In this case, the animal
correlates the fear and isolation that he currently experiences
with his poor treatment of the members of his herd. He views a
past life through the filter of an active situation and is able to re-
evaluate his feelings, exhibiting a form of sensibility-a complex,
human capability.
Throughout the piece the poet forges a profound connection
not simply between deer and king, but between the condition of
this animal and the human condition. We are compelled to feel
his terror, his sadness, and his desperation. We recognize some-
thing of ourselves in his regret. Directly alluding to Narcissus,
Denham adroitly holds a mirror up to the reader's face: "The
stream is so transparent, pure, and clear" (line 213). And in the
end, a royal "Purple floud" "stains" its surface (line 322). At the
moment of the animal's death, audiences are made to confront an
all-embracing reflection. Presented with the image of the water,
one cannot help but envision the deer's face staring back, and
in that image we recall his wistful remembrances, his isolation,
his struggle, and his daring last stand, all things which endear
the creature to audiences, which make him more human than
not, which help create the allegory of the "martyred" king. The
corporeal abruptly invades the mirror-like waters as the blood
darkens the stream. Finally, in this stark contrast of blood set
against the reflection, Denham presents a paradoxical truth: life
is comprised of both intangible passions and material flesh; all
creatures possess a spirit and a body. The stag and Charles are
twin souls in a temporal world.
Influenced by Denham's allegorical episode, Cavendish offers
up a kindred martyr in 'The Hunting of a Stag." Cavendish's piece,
as Alice Fulton contends, is not a direct "allegory of the death
544 Hunted Stagand Beheaded King

of kings," and yet the feelings conjured and the images depicted
indicate a "heartfully profound" remembrance of a monarchy and
a way of life now past.18 In its delineation of natural fear and sim-
plistic animal response Cavendish's poem mimics the bold, honest
emotion of Charles's own work, the Eikon Basilike. Laying bare
his insecurities and regrets in the Eikon, Charles posthumously
invites readers to accept him not as the untouchable king but as
the persecuted man, the hunted animal. Wheeler suggests that
the Eikon "Abandon[s] the formal genres of parliamentary and
ceremonial discourse for the popular genres of religion and sensi-
bility." 19Relying on the growing presence of sensibility within the
culture, the king dons the hat of the poet and tries to convince
audiences to step into his shoes and endure his torment. With
such penetrating observations as "My soul is among lions . . .
whose teeth are spears and arrows, their tongue a sharp sword,"
the king creates an aura of helplessness and terror.20 And in her
poem Cavendish relies upon similar imagery. For Charles, the
Roundhead soldiers are a pack of hungry lions; in Cavendish they
are bloodthirsty hounds whose 'Tongues out of their Mouths hung
long, / Their sides did like a Feaverish Pulse beat strong." The
stag, running blindly, wildly, cannot escape the rowdy 'Troop of
Men, Horse, [and] Dogs," just as Charles, finally trapped by an
angry army, has nowhere to turn.21
Unlike the poetic detachment one finds in Denham's Coopers
Hill, where the "view from a hill," as John M. Wallace establishes,
"afford[s]" the narrative voice the distance necessary to see "all
the problems of the crown and the capital in perspective," Caven-
dish never lets go of the stag, and she never permits her readers
to lose sight of the sublime creature either.22 She is on intimate
terms with this deer and forces her audience to be thus also.
The poem is about the "human" progress of the animal, a nar-
rative of his life from beginning to end encapsulated in the final
moments of his final day. She depicts, for instance, the stag's
newborn-like innocence seen in his unrestrained enthusiasm in
the wheat field. Led by his senses and appetite, he runs toward
the open pasture:

He 'spied a Field, which Sow'd was with Wheat-feed,

The Blades were grown a handfull high and more,
Which Sight to Taste did soon Invite him o're;
In haste he went, Fed full, then down did lye.
(lines 52-5)
AnneElizabethCarson 545

And later she shows us the strength and virility of a young man
in his prime as she suggests a comparison with Caesar:

Had he the Valour had of Caesar stout,

Yet Yield he must to them, or Dye, no doubt;
Turning his Head, as if he Dar'd their spight,
Prepar'd himself against them all to Fight.
(lines 127-30)

In her study "Green Languages? Women Poets as Natural-

ists," Donna Landry maintains that Cavendish's poetry and prose
point to a "democratizing of relations between humans and other
species." Over time the line between mankind and the lesser
mammals becomes blurred, inviting more sentimental juxtaposi-
tions such as that offered by the duchess. Invoking the phrase
"imaginative animism," Frye discerns as one of the key ingredi-
ents of sensibility an unrestricted pity that "treat[s] everything
in nature as though it had human feelings or qualities."23Extant
in Cavendish's oeuvre, this free-flowing pity informs the central
themes of this poem. We see the emergence of a more emotionally
consequential literature, of poetry that takes risks by address-
ing the heart. And in order to reach the heart, Cavendish knows
that she must somehow establish a kinship between the poem's
protagonist and the reader.
Prior to the chase, the poet imbues the stag with distinctly
human traits in her efforts to draw the spectator into this tragedy.
She presents the deer in the initial phase of the piece as self-ab-
sorbed, hampered by the classic flaws of pride and vanity, and yet
these flaws are mitigated by the writer's philanthropic attitude:

In Evenings Cool and Dewy Morning he

Would early Rise and all the Forest see;
Then was he Walking to some Crystal brook,
Not for to Drink, but on his Horns to Look,
Taking such pleasure in his stately Crown,
His Pride forgot that Dogs might pull him down.
(lines 9-14)

That Cavendish had Charles I in mind is obvious: the "stately

Crown," the forest spread out before him, his kingdom to see, but
despite the majestic language and the stag's ultraregal air, the
picture is one of forgivable human weaknesses. She illustrates the
546 Hunted Stag and Beheaded King

deer's (inferably Charles's) liabilities, but does so in a way that

makes them seem insignificant, or rather, significantly a part of
ordinary human makeup.
In the animal's preoccupation with his reflection in the water,
we discern an especially human behavior. As in Denham's work,
echoes of the myth of Narcissus haunt Cavendish's poem as well.
And in his link with this tragic legend, the deer exhibits limita-
tions common to man. Enamored with an objectified version of
himself, the creature envisions his horns as an imagined crown,
and he consequently conceptualizes a princely likeness. This royal
portrait, however, is a deceptive one. Roaming through the forest,
the stag encounters numerous hindrances. His horns, the very
same that earlier represented a majestic headdress, now prove
a deterrent to his progression. Small branches and twigs buffet
his eyes. The path before him presents a labyrinthine struggle as
the poet notes, 'Though hard it was his first way out to find" (line
40). He discovers that his horns are not the tokens of royalty that
the mirror image betrayed but a corporeal reality transfigured
by a fallible sense of pride. He is not the untouchable king, but
flesh and blood, vulnerable and exposed. Therefore, we can look
at the reflection in the brook as a separate, idealized image, the
result of wishful thinking. The stag, in this scene, exhibits what
Sigmund Freud, centuries later, terms "object-love." In his essay
"On Narcissism," Freud concludes that a person loves according
to two types, one of them being the narcissistic type. The object-
choice of a person prone to this kind of love conforms to at least
one of four ideals: "a) What he is himself (actually himself). b)
What he once was. c) What he would like to be. d) Someone who
was once part of himself."24 Admiring his form in the "mirror,"
Cavendish's stag loves his own beauty, his own "sleekness" as
the poem opens with an encomium to the magnificence of the
animal's physique: "His Haunch was broad, Sides large, and
Back was long . . . His Hair lay Sleek and Smooth, he was so
Fair, / None in the Forest might with him Compare" (lines 3-6).
And obviously, the reflection projects the idealized image of what
the deer would like to be: the venerable king unfazed by dog or
hunter. It is another "person" floating in the shimmering stream,
the narcissistic object of his love.
More broadly speaking, the "Crystal brook" represents for stag
and reader alike a universal mirror. We gaze over the animal's
shoulder into the watery reflection to behold the all too familiar
portrait of man. Counting on the narcissistic desires inherent in
every man and woman and their consequent acknowledgement
of such character defects, Cavendish positions the hubris of the
Anne Elizabeth Carson 547

deer not as the antagonist in the poem but as a reality which

we all at one time or another must confront in a mirror image.
Tacitly hinting that perhaps it is our own self-important reflec-
tion that we recognize in the "human" reflection of the stag, the
author draws us into a deeper connection with this animal. We
forgive and sympathize rather than condemn and ostracize. The
deer dies not because of his vanity-if that were the case the en-
tire mortal race would be in trouble-but because he reacts as a
mortal would, to the reflection before him, to his hunger, to the
rabid pack of dogs.
The antagonists and most inhuman types in this piece are,
ironically, the hunters. They are bereft of compassion, relishing
only the carnage: "But when they see a Ruine and a Fall, / They
come with Joy, as if they'd Conquer'd all" (lines 111-2). In the
end, Cavendish combines the men with the dogs, no distinctions
made between the two classes of hunters, both engaged in bestial
acts: 'Then Men and Dogs did Circle him about, / Some Bit, some
Bark'd, all Ply'd him at the Bay" (lines 136-7). Against these sav-
age characters the reader revolts, and the early narcissism of the
stag is overshadowed by their tyranny. Having seen something
of ourselves in the poet's delineation of the deer, we are at last
hemmed in with the king/stag and imaginatively experience his
dread and death. Cavendish solidifies audience sympathy for the
creature by finally painting a most pitiable and still brave portrait
of the noble beast:

The Stag no hope had left, nor help did 'spy,

His Heart so heavy grew with Grief and Care,
That his small Feet his Body scarce could bear;
Yet loath to Dye, or yield to Foes was he,
And to the last would strive for Victory.
(lines 120-4)

While Cavendish and Denham use the image of the deer as

an object of pity and also as a vessel through which people might
vicariously experience desperation and pain, Andrew Marvell
utilizes his fawn in a slightly different manner. In "The Nymph
Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn," the young girl becomes
the primary agent with whom we are to identify. Her grief evokes
sympathy and pity. Her remembrances of the fawn lead readers
down a path of emotional reflection and compassionate response.
Driving the sentimentality inherent in the poem, the nymph teach-
es audiences how to read humanely, how to mourn earnestly:
548 Hunted Stagand Beheaded King

For I so truly thee bemoane,

That I shall weep though I be Stone:
Until my Tears, still dropping, wear
My breast, themselves engraving there.25

Ever shifting the focus from the murdered deer to the maiden's
tears, the poet proffers readers a vivid picture of the yet unreal-
ized poetics of sensibility. The heroine, distraught, caught up in
the whirlwind of her own visceral response, stands as the em-
bodiment of "sympathy, sensation, romantic love, instinct, and
spontaneity."26
In the eighteenth century one of the major concerns asso-
ciated with the incipient "cult of sensibility" was what many,
according to Janet Todd, disdainfully labeled the "unfortunate
feminization of culture." Barbara Benedict explains, "'female
values' exemplified] the dangers as well as advances of new cul-
ture," while G. J. Barker-Benfield's study emphasizes that the
tendencies to which some men were prone in light of this cult
of sensibility were likely to transform such men into feminized
versions of themselves.27 Qualities such as passivity, excessive
delicacy, and self-absorption-stereotypically female traits-were
understood as trademarks of this brand of sentimental expres-
sion. And here, in an early guise of this style of literature, we also
discern these "feminine" qualities. Marvell's nymph brings such
"suspect" characteristics to the forefront of the poem.
Initially, the young girl speaks of her fears and her poignant
memories of Sylvio as she complains of the death of her fawn-a
gift from her beloved. Later, however, as realized through the
maiden's lamentations, the humanistic deer gradually comes to
supplant Sylvio; the creature appropriates the "beloved" desig-
nation. The nymph's heartfelt wailings re-envision the animal as
one with appreciable feelings and behaviorisms. Like Cavendish's
stag, the fawn also passes through the various stages of man.
The animal is a baby suckled by its mother: "With sweetest milk,
and sugar, first/ I it at mine own fingers nurst"; it is an energetic
child, playful and happy: "With what a pretty skipping grace / It
oft would challenge me the Race"; it is flirtatious and amorous:
"And then to me 'twould boldly trip, / And print those Roses on
my Lip"; at last, it is a pensive and dying mortal being: "See how it
weeps. The Tears do come / Sad, slowly dropping like a Gumme"
(lines 55-6, 65-6, 85-6, 95-6).
While reading Marvell's fawn as an allegorical Charles I does
not seem a popular interpretation, several critics do agree that the
Anne ElizabethCarson 549

animal, while not an explicit embodiment of the executed king,

does share an emotional connection with him. Victoria Silver, for
instance, configures nymph and deer as one unit symbolizing a
radically softened version of the monarch: "the Nymph with her
pet ... are King Charles in disguise-but Charles effeminized or
rather sublimated by his death, in the form of... nostalgic or
sentimental art." Lois Potter admits that while readings which
substitute king for fawn are not prevalent, the pathos of Marvell's
piece resonates with a Royalist audience pining for an abolished
monarchy: 'The poem need not be directly about the king at all,
but it appeals to the same emotions that were being allowed to
cluster around him: pathetic, feminine, safely inactive."28 In their
efforts to turn Charles into a more sympathetic figure, into a "man
of feeling," poets, whether consciously or not, are inclined to imbue
the symbolic stand-in with "womanly" tendencies. Marvell's piece
is no exception: the fawn, a neuter-as the speaker is careful to
use only androgynous pronouns, "it"and "this"-is still described
in very feminine language:

I blush to see its foot more soft,

And white, (shall I say than my hand?)
NAY any Ladies of the Land.
?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But all its chief delight was still

On Roses thus its self to fill:
And its pure virgin Limbs to fold
In whitest sheets of Lillies cold.
(lines 60-90)

Whether or not we are meant to understand the fawn as

Charles becomes, as Potter suggests, secondary to a need to
comprehend the sentimental feelings extant in postwar England.
The nymph's maudlin display coupled with the deer's "pathetic
. . . safely inactive," arguably "feminine" status engender an at-
mosphere of tenderness and loss that engages already doleful
readers. As in Cavendish's work, the "wanton troopers" and even
Sylvio are posited as antagonists to the sacrificial fawn, creat-
ing a masculine/feminine paradigm that speaks to the poem's
entrenched sensibility. Given the presence of such barbarous
invaders, one cannot help but compare the animal's experience to
that of the newly gentled king, and through the fictional scenario
the reader is made to feel a renewed sense of pity for a monarch
who also died "as calmely as a Saint" (line 94).
550 HuntedStagand Beheaded King

Beyond these less conventional poetic requiems that inter-

polate images of persecuted stags or fawns, a number of tradi-
tional elegists employ animal imagery to the same ends. Henry
King, instead of "wanton troopers," in his Elegy presents an
"unkennell'd crew of Lawless men" in pursuit of the monarch.29
Using words such as "unkennell'd," King establishes the hunt-
ers as the true beasts. Charles meanwhile becomes their frantic,
wild-eyed prey:

Then all Dissenters in Both Houses Bay'd.

At which the King amaz'd is forc'd to flye,
The whilst your Mouth's laid on maintain the Cry.
The Royal Game dislodg'd and under Chase,
Your hot Pursute dogs him from place to place.
(lines 140-4)

Up to this point in the poem, the author assays to portray Charles

in an eminent, martial light using phrases such as: "Bold as Je-
hosaphat" and "Europes Most Glorious King" (lines 33, 72). How-
ever, following the treachery of the "Faction," the king's mighty
image shrinks. Depicting Charles as a defenseless animal on
the run, the poet begets a version of the monarch equal to every
man: 'The Mountain Partridge or the Chased Roe / Might now
for Emblemes of His Fortune go" (lines 149-50). As a stalked
deer, or partridge especially, Charles is no longer the formidable
Caesar, but a miserable wretch. We feel for the king because the
writer suddenly situates him as an underdog who cannot possibly
prevail; the entire nation is incriminated in this "King-catching
Sport" (line 154).
In an elegy published the year of Charles's execution and
later presented to Charles II upon his restoration to the throne,
Anthony Sadler, depending on the usual litany of mournful
prayer and funereal utterance, also incorporates the image of
the hunted hart:

I Hope, some true Historian will impart,

his Observations on this Royall HART;
which was so Foully Hunted, and became,
so great a Prey; to such as scorn'd the GAME.30

Sadler, combining the question of historical accuracy with poetic

lament, addresses an issue that occupies a number of writers of
this postwar era.31 By presenting a purely historical rendering of
Anne ElizabethCarson 551

the war and its tragic aftermath, writers would be hard-pressed

to generate the type of sympathy and emotion needed to rouse
audiences who were, for the most part, tired of battle and inured
to the idea of a Commonwealth. Rather, they needed to combat
the hard-line, depersonalizing tactics of the opposition.32 This
conflation of history and elegy that Sadler creates bespeaks the
strategy of many seventeenth-century poets: to de-politicize his-
tory in an attempt to reconstruct it. He is asking the historian to
look back and judge not the historical events but the pathos of the
situation. He implores the annalist to envision Charles not simply
as a monarch beheaded for alleged crimes against the state, but
as a victimized deer brutally torn apart by malicious predators,
men who have no regard for the sport or for the prey. The last
line of the above stanza intimates that indeed Sadler believes it
necessary to respect the game, to hunt honorably acknowledging
the animal as a worthy adversary. And therefore, by portraying
the hart as stalked and persecuted in a vicious manner, Sadler
hopes to counteract the rhetoric of the Parliamentarians with his
affecting image of an unfairly hunted king.

More than merely relaying their desolation, the poets of the

post-Civil War era feel compelled to draw readers into their Roy-
alist melancholy and create a community of mourners; in an
effort to do this, writers regularly subdue the king's image. He
goes from an unapproachable ambassador of divine right to the
brokenhearted father, husband, and patriot. Seeking to represent
history without writing historically per se, these poets focus on
the humanity of the king, permitting readers to enter a hitherto
impenetrable circle and remake Charles's image in the colors of
their own sorrow. They break down that rigid barrier between
monarch and man. And this is in many ways what we later see in
the writings of eighteenth-century scholars and artists involved
with sentimental literature. The line between social persona and
the inner self becomes a starting point for a broader exploration
of man's emotional capacity.
If we look, for instance, at the language that David Hume
uses to describe Charles in his History of England, we see a fairly
elaborate analysis of this boundary between the king's public per-
sona and his private self. Hume, recounting the monarch's death,
speaks directly to the duality of this historical figure: "he never
forgot his part, either as a prince or as a man."33 Audiences read of
his final stoicism, his Christlike pardoning of enemies, the bravery
untainted by "rashness," and yet Hume also presents readers with
552 Hunted Stagand Beheaded King

Charles the father, whose paternal eyes fill "with tears of joy and
admiration," and Charles the husband who prizes his "conjugal
tenderness" above all else (p. 376). The man behind the crown
is susceptible to ordinary human sensitivities and reactions: he
weeps, he loves, he regrets. Hume produces the sentimental story
of a vulnerable ruler who, though he may have begun his reign
as a prince "incapable of giving way to the spirit of liberty" which
was slowly inflaming England, is at last exalted in his death,
suddenly loved by and deeply connected to the people who once
believed him a tyrant (p. 64). The animal figures that Cavendish
and others utilize represent primitive precursors to this senti-
mentalized Charles of Hume's History. In Cavendish's stag, for
instance, readers witness the transformation of the self-satisfied
stalwart into a creature who comes to realize his infinitesimality
in the face of impending death. Like Hume's "sweet but melan-
choly" king, in his desperation, the duchess's deer responds as
any sentimental hero might: "His Heart so heavy grew with Griefe,
and Care," and in the face of his demise he "[s]hed[s] some Tears
at his own Funeral" (p. 380; lines 121, 140).
While Hume's portrayal is a more evolved version of the sen-
timentality exhibited in the works of these post-Civil War poets,
the key to understanding both generations of sensibility is sym-
pathy. Hume finds resemblance to be the impetus precipitating
sympathetic response: "All human creatures are related to us
by resemblance. Their persons, therefore, their interests, their
passions, their pains and pleasures must strike upon us in a
lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to the original
one." Adam Smith offers a more intense explanation for sympa-
thy suggesting that "[b]y the imagination we place ourselves in
[the sufferer's] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the
same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in
some measure the same person with him, and thence form some
idea of his sensations."34 In either scenario it is a man's ability to
relate to another by drawing on the example of his own emotional
disposition that enables him to feel pity for the distressed sub-
ject. In his narrative of the king's final days, Hume demonstrates
his own capacity for manipulating the average reader. He forces
people to evaluate Charles while considering their own emotional
response; the monarch's pain strikes audiences in a "lively man-
ner." A century earlier, Denham, Cavendish, Marvell, and King,
anticipating Smith and Hume, realize that in order to evoke a
commiserative reaction to Charles's downfall they must tell a story
in which the central character, while maintaining a royal posture,
is not unlike the common man or woman. For Charles's tragedy
Anne Elizabeth Carson 553

to be truly appreciated he cannot be the untouchable potentate;

he must be a being who can feel and who can bleed. Writers have
to navigate the king/man dichotomy carefully. The symbol of the
pursued animal becomes the ideal agent for doing this. While
the illustrious stag is veritable royalty among his fellow animals,
armies of men and horses still rather easily conquer him. People
can feel superior to the creature and at the same time lament the
destruction of his noble regality. Nigel Smith claims that much
of the writing that comes out of this period speaks not merely to
the "'facts"' but to the "eventfulness of human interaction"; these
seventeenth-century authors examine human interaction on more
than one level.35 They address issues of sympathy, of sentimental
identification, and of empathetic imagination. Ironically, a num-
ber of postwar poets bring the "human" component of battle and
execution to the forefront by looking to the animal.

NOTES

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, in The Riverside Shakespeare,

ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 1100-34, III.
i.204-10.
2Earl Miner, The Cavalier Modefrom Jonson to Cotton (New Jersey: Princ-
eton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 128.
3Miner, p. 178.
4 Elizabeth
Skerpan Wheeler, "Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-
Representation," in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed.
Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 122-40,
136; James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn
Sword, Early Modern Literature in History, ed. Cedric C. Brown (London:
Macmillan, 1997), p. 148; Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628-1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), p. 271; Joad Raymond, "Popular
Representations of Charles I,"in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles
I, pp. 47-73, 61.
5 Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," in Fables of
Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), pp.
130-7, 135.
'William Wordsworth, "Hart-Leap Well," 1800, in The Poetical Works of
William Wordsworth: Poems Founded on the Affections, Poems on the Naming
of Places, Poems of the Fancy, Poems of the Imagination, vol. 2, The Poetical
Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1944), pp. 249-54, lines 29-32, 41-4. For a discussion of the "poetic pity"
associated with animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see David
Perkins's essay "Wordsworth and the Polemic Against Hunting: 'Hart-Leap
Well,"' Nineteenth-Century Literature 52, 4 (March 1998): 421-45, 435.
7
Nigel Smith, for instance, looks at the ways in which seventeenth-
century verse wrestles with traditional boundaries. Struggling in a hostile
atmosphere, Royalist literature was produced "fugitively"; despite its best
554 Hunted Stag and Beheaded King

intentions it found itself a "desacralised form." Smith goes on to discuss the

obvious paradox of both panegyric and elegy, poetic genres which, he con-
cludes, deny their formal foundations in their implicit desire for privacy, their
focus on inner feeling and self-discovery (Literature and Revolution in England,
1640-1660 [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994], pp. 11, 279). Lois Potter
comments on the absence of the historical in postwar poetics, maintaining
that more important was turning the figure of Charles into an archetype, "a
representative of all the abstractions which hold society together." She views
the pathos inherent in poetry of this period as indicative of a shift in objective
(Secret Rites and Secret Writing:Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 [Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989], p. 186).
HSee for instance The Aeneid, book 7, the episode in which Ascanius
kills the stag that Silvia lovingly "dressed," "combed," and "bathed" (ed. Allen
Mandelbaum [New York: Bantam Books, 1981], lines 628-73).
' Margaret Cavendish supports the notion that beasts experience plea-
sure and pain: "Whatsoever hath motion hath sensitive spirits .. .[S]o that
all matter is moving, or moved by the movers; if so, all things have sense,
because all things have of these spirits in them" (The Philosophical and Physi-
cal Opinions, Written by her Excellency, the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastle,
1st edn. [London: 16551, p. 21). A century later we find that such ideas are
still prevalent as David Hume writes of the perceptible affections of animals:
"we may observe, not only that love and hatred are common to the whole of
sensitive creation, but likewise that their causes . . . are of so simple a na-
ture . . . Every thing is conducted by springs and principles, which are not
peculiar to man, or any one species of animals" (A Treatise of Human Nature,
eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, Oxford Philosophical Texts, ed.
John Cottingham [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20001, p. 255).
1' Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern
Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 177.
' A. Lytton Sells, Animal Poetry in French and English Literature and
the Greek Tradition, Indiana University Publications Humanities Series 34
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1955), p. 110; Thomas, p. 148.
12 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us
(New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 105.
1' Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neo-
classic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1959),
p. 60.
14 John
Denham, Coopers Hill, in Expans'd Hieroglyphicks: A Critical
Edition of Sir John Denham's "Coopers Hill," by Brendan O Hehir (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1969) (The "B" Text, Draft IV, 1655; 1668), pp.
137-62, line 28. All subsequent references to Coopers Hill will be taken from
O Hehir's text and cited parenthetically by line number.
'5Wasserman, p. 76.
16 0 Hehir, "Introduction to
Coopers Hill," pp. 1-73, 35.
17Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the
Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 22.
8Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of
Poetry (Saint Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), p. 101.
"'Wheeler, p. 137.
Anne Elizabeth Carson 555

20
Charles I, Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his
Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip A. Knachel, Folger Documents of Tudor
and Stuart Civilization (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), p. 93.
21 Margaret Cavendish, 'The Hunting of a Stag," in Early Modern Women

Poets, ed. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2001), pp. 304-7, lines 71-2, 61. All subsequent references to Cavendish's
poem will be taken from this edition and cited parenthetically by line num-
ber.
22John M. Wallace, "Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royal-
ism, 1641," ELH41, 4 (Winter 1974): 494-540, 497.
23 Donna Landry, "Green
Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in
1653 and 1807," Huntington Library Quarterly 63, 4 (2000): 467-89, 471;
Frye, p. 135.
24 Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism," in General
Psychological Theory:
Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff, The Collected Papers of Sigmund
Freud (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 56-82, 71.
25Andrew Marvell, "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun,"
in Andrew Marvell: Complete Poetry, ed. George deF. Lord (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1968), pp. 19-22, lines 115-8. All future references to Marvell's
poem will be taken from this edition and cited parenthetically in the text by
line number.
26 Barbara M. Benedict on the values endorsed by a culture of
sensibility
(Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800 [New
York: AMS Press, 1994], p. 9); also see Daniel Jaeckle, "Marvell's Dialogized
Nymph" (SEL 43, 1 [Winter 2003]: 137-50, especially 144) for a reading of
the relationship between the nymph's use of "self-reflexive imagery" and the
language of Civil War poetics.
27Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Metheun, 1986), p.
43; Benedict, p. 13; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex
and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1992), p. 99.
28Victoria Silver, "The Obscure Script of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little
Girls in Marvell's Pastorals," ELH 68, 1 (Spring 2001): 29-55, 44; Potter, p. 193.
29
Henry King, An Elegy upon the Most Incomparable King Charles the
I: Persecuted by Two Implacable Factions, Imprisoned by the One, and Mur-
thered by the Other, January 30th 1648, 1st edn. (London, 1648), line 137.
All subsequent references to King's Elegy will be from this edition and cited
parenthetically in the text.
30 Anthony Sadler, The Loyall Mourner, Shewing the Murdering of King
Charles the First. Shewing the Restoring of King Charles the Second., 2d edn.
(London, 1648, 1660), p. 6, sec. VI.
31 In Time's Witness: Historical
Representations in English Poetry, 1603-
1660 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Gerald Maclean looks at
the "limitations" afforded by traditional historical verse and the struggle that
mid-century poets faced when trying to reconcile elegy with history.
32
Stephen Zwicker contends that Milton, for example, aims to "deper-
sonalize the king's struggle so that civil war might be elevated into history,
a realm distant from the mixed and trivial genres" (Lines ofAuthority: Politics
and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993],
p. 45).
556 Hunted Stag and Beheaded King

33 Hume, The History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to

the Abdication ofJames II, 1688, 6 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1858),
5:374. All subsequent references to this text will be from this edition and
this volume, cited parenthetically by page number.
34
Hume, Treatise, p. 238; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment, ed.
Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), p. 12.
35Nigel Smith, p. 50.